Jake Nevins
‘Hit the Line Hard’

During the cold war, football’s violence became precisely its point.

T. H. Breen
Commanders and Courtiers

The Howe family achieved an influential position of power in late-eighteenth-century Britain, propelled by the shrewd social intelligence of the Howe women.

from ‘Twenty Collars’

a poem by 
Farnoosh Fathi

Into the upper lip sun—teeth cubed beneath it. Silence jeered on the moss, leaked so incrementally that, in some other realm moreover, a gargantuan flood could click its pen. In a gushing independence, only an ogre kissing guesses could live there. His roof a worsted novel…

Matthew Aucoin
Performance as Immolation

The conductor Carlos Kleiber’s aesthetic was founded on the interplay between voluptuous refinement and an impulse to violence.

Liza Batkin
The Empty Words of the Religious Right

The legal group Alliance Defending Freedom has perfected a tactic for twisting the First Amendment: casting discriminators as visionaries persecuted by despotic laws.

Free from the Archives

In 1963 the writer and Paris Review editor George Plimpton took part in preseason training with the Detroit Lions, ostensibly trying out to be quarterback. He wrote about his experiences for a series in Sports Illustrated that was later expanded into a 1966 book, which the Canadian writer Mordecai Richler reviewed in the magazine’s February 23, 1967, issue. Richler, no fan of football—“A middle-class WASP’s game. I still associate it with hip flasks, raccoon coats, and loud boring McGill alumni making fools of themselves in downtown Montreal”—was nonetheless captivated by “the force of sheer good writing” in Plimpton’s account.

Mordecai Richler
A Hero of Our Time

“If the profits to be made out of sports are immense, just possibly immorally high, then club owners differ from the tycoons in other industries by asking for our hearts as well as our money.”